- From: Scott Jenson <scott@jenson.org>
- Date: Wed, 17 Apr 2013 06:35:11 -0700
- To: Dominique Hazael-Massieux <dom@w3.org>
- Cc: "public-closingthegap@w3.org" <public-closingthegap@w3.org>
- Message-ID: <CACLVYsH32hyy4Bvwp7Dbun_ZQVG1ChjbDqXtyJ4oP-fYELLq8A@mail.gmail.com>
On Wed, Apr 17, 2013 at 1:27 AM, Dominique Hazael-Massieux <dom@w3.org>wrote: > Arguably, one could imagine that the retail store of my example would be > more than happy to offer free Wifi to its customers if that made it > easier for them to e.g. buy more stuff. > > ... > Could you maybe describe a bit more how you would use BT4 to broadcast a > Web app, and what this growl-like app would need to do? Is your > expectation that this growl-like app would be the browser itself? a > third-party native app? a Web app itself? > I've already prototyped a simple Android app to do this. It is 'an app' that you download but it runs in the background. It could just as easily be a feature of a browser. It looks for Wifi AND Bluetooth SSIDs and if it finds one, it puts the discovered URL in the notifications bar. If you selected the notification it opens the browser in full chrome view to view that URL. This approach shows two things: 1) The background process can work across multiple technologies. There won't be one single winner here and this app acts as a agent, looking for all sorts of things. When something new a shiny comes along this app can be updated yet the basic experience remains the same, you can just see more stuff. 2) My discovery approach was a bit of a hack for wifi, I just munged the SSID to be a specific pattern **NAME**URL (you can imaging better parsing structures. So I had a dummy wifi device called **Jukebox** www.xyz.com/jukebox12' This created a strange looking wifi hotspot but my software would only show 'Jukebox' in the notification area. BT4 is much more sophisticated and has a 'service discovery' layer that would allow you to look for 'Web Devices' and pull out the URL. I believe the same is for Wifi Direct. Supporting one (or both) of those would make it automatic and simple. My problems with Wifi are twofold: 1) You have to join the LAN first and some phones don't do this automatically so it'll be a bit fiddly to see things easily. and 2) You can never talk *to* the wifi device, you can only talk to a URL which means you have to rendezvous through the cloud. Not horrible, just a networking inefficiency Scott
Received on Wednesday, 17 April 2013 13:35:39 UTC